Hand in hand with our recent volume discounts and LightSpeed 3.0 release we have started to put in place an improved support capability for customers who need priority support options or may occasionally want to escalate support beyond what we normally offer.

Tooting our own horn a little, we have had very positive feedback from many customers who have said our support is fantastic. We hope this addition helps us maintain end user happiness as we continue to grow and our support load scales up.

What is priority support?

Priority support is the option to ensure that your request is dealt with promptly, and is reviewed before and prioritised over normal forum posts. It is also useful for folks who wish to not use the forum which is quite open and may not be viable for talking about sensitive parts of a software system.

Can I use it for feature requests?

No, we still urge that feature requests be posted in the forums so that others may discuss them (and because we don’t think it’s fair to charge you for suggesting cool features!). Features are still only added to products at our discretion.

How much does priority support cost?

We have priced support at $199 USD per priority support issue OR at $499 for a 5 pack of support issues, a 50% saving. You will be able to see if you have support tickets in your store account page. We have been issuing 1 priority support ticket per customer to LightSpeed 3.0 customers and upgrading Enterprise Edition customers. For other products, we’re in the process of migrating Enterprise customers to have a priority ticket added to their account.

The pricing is designed to be very cost effective and is inexpensive compared to the support options offered for other software (for example, one commercial NHibernate support vendor quotes 600 Euro, approximately $870 USD, per incident for ad hoc support).

If you need a guaranteed response, or a quick response is crucial to you, or you don’t want to discuss your issue on the public forum, then you should put a request through priority support. The forum will still get monitored actively by Mindscape staff and questions will be answered, but there are no guarantees around response times (our response times have usually been pretty good, but never guaranteed!).

3 Responses to “Improved support options for customers”

Wow, that’s expensive IMHO. Priority support is free with many other vendor’s products – like DevExpress’ XPO.

Might be OK for large companies, but what about the little one-man-shop thinking of buying your product?

John BaddaDec 16th, 2009

Hi John,

Thank you for your feedback. I could be wrong but I think you will find that priority support is only offered on the subscription products that are at least $1299 USD per developer. It would appear the price of priority support is simply factored into the initial price rather than having a “user pays” model. Like almost all other vendors, we do provide priority support tickets with purchase on some products (e.g. existing Enterprise licenses and our Mega Pack subscriptions) however this option means that anyone can now get access to priority support should they want it. For example, you may have purchased an inexpensive single user license without support options and been comfortable with it but then ran into a critical issue you would like help with at the last minute – you now have the option to get priority in that support.

Having said that, the key message we wanted to get across was that support is still available in the forum and is not going away. We love the community that has built up there and will continue to work diligently to help folks out when they need it. Priority support is an option that is available to those who want it, not a requirement of everyone.

I hope that helps explain why we think this is an improvement. Thank you for your feedback though – pricing and options for customers are always tricky for companies to get right so feedback is really helpful in ensuring we get things right :-)